The present invention relates to a communication network, and more specifically, to determining influential and/or popular participants in such a communication network.
In typical communication network applications, such as online games, a player may be engaged in social experience while interacting with communication partners and virtual worlds. The effectiveness of the social experience can be important to the player, who may have many choices of online games and other activities. The effectiveness of the social experience is also important to online game providers in retaining players to be engaged in the games offered by the providers.
It has been well established that players tend to play and stay with games that “their friends play”, which drives clusters of players to certain games. Also, it has been observed that players rarely have the time or attention for more than one, or perhaps two, online games at a time. Thus, players usually will stop playing a particular game when another game has their attention, or the attention of a sufficient proportion of their friends. Therefore, online game providers have encouraged the formation of online friendship groups by providing “guilding” and grouping tools, which allow players to associate themselves with a group of players for a long or short term. This is somewhat effective in attracting and retaining players. However, other incentives can be provided to more effectively attract and retain players.
Accordingly, many online game providers communicate and interact with their “game community”, a collective group of players for one or more online games. However, to effectively communicate and interact with their “game community”, the game providers must spend time and money determining which players represent or are the leaders of the game community internally.
One method used to identify community leaders is by examining formal player organizations, such as guild membership, which may be structured as in president/vice president/officer/member/initiate. In this case, guild presidents are the de facto leaders, and guild membership or activity can be used to rank presidents to find the most “powerful” of the guild leaders. Another method used to identify community leaders is to examine message board posts. Outside of the game itself, online game providers typically also provide a “bulletin board” system of messaging for players to communicate with each other and with the game provider's representatives. Through personal experience, or with automated tools, provider representatives nominate players for their activity level, the quality and quantity of their posts, or other related criteria. This process may be partially or fully automated as well. However, other methods can be provided to more effectively identify influential and/or popular players.